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Licenta
Information Booklet
The following guidelines are relevant to IIIrd year undergraduate students and
IInd year Master students who wish to write their BA ProjectlDissertation in
English. They were issued in order to assist such students in the preparation,
production, and revision stages of BA ProjectlDissertation writing, preceding the
oral presentation of the finished product.
The BA Project and the MA Dissertation are an academic exercise aimed at
demonstrating that, independently, students can organise and produce a
substantial piece of individual work. Therefore, the students embarking upon the
production of such papers, will mainly be responsible for
deciding upon a topic
discussing it with the supervisor
writing the paper
editing, typing, and proofreading it
submitting it at the right time
Some of the aspects outlined above are worth looking at in more detail.
1.
2. Supervision
Finding a supervisor and seeking his/her advice on the suitability of the topic you
would like to deal with is your responsibility. Once the topic has been negotiated,
you and your supervisor should work out a schedule of progress meetings
(individual consultations) to take place on a regular (e.g. weekly/bimonthly/
monthly) basis.
Remember that it is you who must take initiative
in arranging these meetings
help you produce an outline, so as to clarify the aim, objectives, and scope
of your Project/Dissertation and ensure that the content is valid, relevant
and systematically dealt with;
(ii)
(iii)
advise you on what to read and what other sources of information to use;
(iv)
discuss and sort out major problems that may arise in the research/writing
process;
(v)
read carefully and comment on the draft material you produce, and
indicate to you any noticeable shortcomings in the way you are dealing
with the task at hand. You will be expected to take notice of the
supervisor's comments/recommenda-tions and rewrite your draft
accordingly.
Remember that
your supervisor is not the proofreader of your work: this means that the
drafts you submit should be neat, reader-friendly, and as error- and
typo-free as possible;
3. Ethical considerations
The BA Project/MA Dissertation submitted for the final assessment must be the
student's own work. Unacknowledged direct copying from the work of another
person, or the close paraphrasing of somebody else's work is called plagiarism
and is a serious offence, equated with cheating in examinations. This applies to
copying both from other students' work and from published sources as books,
reports or journal articles, whether on paper or on the internet.
Use of citations, of quotes or data from the work of others is entirely acceptable,
and is often very valuable, provided that the source of the quotation or data is
given (see also section 5 below). It is not acceptable, however, to put together
unacknowledged passages from the same or from different sources, linking these
together with a few words or sentences of your own and changing a few words
from the original text: this is regarded as over-dependence on other sources,
which is a form of plagiarism.
4.2 Justification
Full justification, blocked paragraphs (not indented) and a blank line between
paragraphs are recommended. Alternatively, you may use the traditional format,
with indented paragraphs and no additional separation line between them. In
either case, the chapter titles will be centred, and the section/subsection titles
will be left-justified.
4.3 Styles
You may use bolds for:
the front page of your project
the contents page of your project
chapter, section, and subsection titles
names of authors in the reference list
Bold italic may be used in the text for special emphasis.
Use italics for:
unassimilated borrowings, and for Latin, French, German formulae (e.g.
status quo, ad hoc. comme il faut, Zeitgeist);
(optionally for) abbreviations typically used in academic discourse: i.e., e.g.,
cf., etc., q.v.;
isolated Romanian/non-English words in otherwise English sentences;
titles of books in the reference list (see section 5 below)
for emphasis, i.e. when you are especially attracting your reader's
attention to one or several words; for the same purpose, you may
alternatively use bolds or underlines. If the highlighted words belong to a
quotation and they are not in italics/bolds/underlines in the original text,
do not forget to mention: (my emphasis) or (emphasis added).
This suggests that there no longer is one English language, not even inside the Inner
Circle, all the more so in communities where English is used as a second or foreign
language. As Graddol (2000:3) states, '... the increasing adoption of English as a second
language, where it takes on local forms, is leading to fragmentation and diversity. No
longer is it the case, if it ever was, that English unifies all who speak it' (emphasis added).
4.4 Margins
Left: 3.5 to 4 cm (maximum); Right, Top, and Bottom: 2 to 2.5 cm (maximum).
4.7 Notes
You may use either footnotes, or end of chapter notes with numbers in the text
and a numbered list at the end of each chapter.
4.8 Quotations
Quotations will be signalled by single quotes: if the passage thus quoted already
includes a quotation (a word/phrase/sentence), the quote within the quote will
be marked by double quotes.
Optionally, quotations (which may be inserted in their original, untranslated
version), when longer, may be indented on both sides; additionally, they may be
italicised, like in the example below:
As Connor (1996:15) points out, at that stage contrastive rhetoric was very much
error-based: 'error' was taken to be everything which departed from the English-style
rhetorical organisation. In Kaplan's own words,
'At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable to look at the texts that students produced, and to try
to determine where their production deviated from that of the native speakers (writers). In order to
do that, it was necessary to have a baseline set of data descriptive of the production of texts by native
speakers. And an obvious place to look for such baseline data seemed to lie in the work being done
in English as a mother tongue education' (1988: 276).
For short items listed after bullets or numbers use the bullets/numbers icon
and no punctuation at line ends. Use either capitals or low case after
bullets.
5. Referencing
Two aspects of referencing are relevant here:
The same theory was later given more weight by Lado (1957), a former student of Fries,
who maintained that... etc.
Example 2:
Valdman (1993:15) claims that it is highly difficult to do research that answers relevant
questions in the area of second-language learning for reasons which... etc.
where (1993:15) reads as (year of publication:page) where the quotation can be
found).
In his work Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), Lado extends the framework in such a way as
to accommodate elements of cross-cultural analysis... etc.
In a series of references, the sequencing criterion may be either (a) alphabetical
or (b) chronological:
(a)
Faerch and Kasper (1981), Godfrey (1980), Schachter (1974) and Schachter and
Celce-Murcia (1977) have all pointed to 'avoidance strategies' as another form of covert
grammatical error.
(b)
Schachter (1974), Schachter and Celce-Murcia (1977), Godfrey (1980) and Faerch and
Kasper (1981) have all pointed to 'avoidance strategies' as another form of covert
grammatical error.
If you take a quotation from a source other than the original, (secondary
quotation) show where you got it from. For example,
Reference to a book
Connor, U. (1996)
* *
B.A. PROJECT/
M.A. DISSERTATION
Student
(full name)
(font size 18 points)
Supervisor
dr. (full name)
(font size 18 points)
Braov
year
(font size 18 points)
7.
8.
9.